Terminals: Digital Dark Age

Today I started work on the terminals (computers) for each of the key points in Digital Dark Age. Each terminal will essentially be the starting point for each corresponding song on the album, and offer information to the player as they play through the level. I’d love to say I know how to create an interactive computer system in-game, but I don’t! So, the likelyhood is that each terminal will merely act as a trigger to display information nearby (possibly text or graphics / dialogue).

A quick flythrough of the first section of the level so far.

As you can see above, the terminals basically replicate the main DDA logo that floats over the main pathway. The tricky thing here was re-creating the motion graphic of the logo on the terminal’s screen… it’s hard to see in the video but it is actually glowing and glimmering slightly on the old CRT monitor! I might exaggerate this in further iterations of the idea.

Aligning the graphic was a nightmare…

I ran into a number of issues, but finally settled on using a Flipbook in Unreal to create an animated version of a spritesheet (see below). This was something I had very little previous knowledge about so I turned to Youtube for help, and after some messing about (including a lot of resizing / scaling / rotating) I finally got it to fit on the screen, albeit with some weird horizontal compression. Turns out, I think that looks pretty cool on the old-school CRT monitor so I think I’ll be sticking with it. You can see the difference in the scale in the picture above.

Creating the animated material in UE

I’m reusing the computer model that I implemented in DATA Labs which was created by SilverTM – check out their page on the UE marketplace here for some of the other awesome stuff they make.